The Hackberry of the English Garden

Ancient writers put this tree forward as the lotus that made Odysseus's crew forget the way home. Celtis australis carries small dark fruit on long stalks, sweet and vaguely date-like when ripe, which is enough to keep the identification alive; a thorny North African shrub, Ziziphus lotus, has an equally old claim on the same story, and nobody has settled it. The wood is not in dispute. Hackberry is hard and flexible in a way few Mediterranean broadleaves are, and Italian workshops turned it for centuries into tool handles, walking sticks, whip stocks and the long forks used for turning hay. It is also one of the standard shade trees of the Italian piazza, planted for a wide canopy and for roots that put up with being paved over. This one has been asked to do neither job. Three metres fifty around the trunk and twenty-five metres tall, it stands in the English Garden among kurrajongs, redwoods and Himalayan pines, which is an odd room for a species most Italians walk past without looking up. The trees around it were shipped in from four continents for a queen who wanted a collection. The hackberry needed no shipping at all: the species grows wild across Italy and through the Mediterranean basin. The register gives it about two hundred years, an estimate rather than a count, which makes it one of the longer-standing things in a garden laid out from 1786.